A team of researchers from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and its partner institutions, University of Washington and Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, just received a coveted Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program Breakthrough award. The four-year, $4 million award, led by principal investigators Drs. Cyrus Ghajar and Stanley Riddell of Fred Hutch, will launch an innovative investigation aimed at preventing late-onset, metastatic breast…
In pursuit of changing the course of Alzheimer’s, support is growing to explore new avenues that might unlock mysteries of this brain disease. This includes investigating the link between aging eyes and aging brains. Cecilia Lee, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, recently received a $17.2 million grant from the National Institute on…
Ashleigh Theberge, a University of Washington assistant professor of chemistry, has been named a 2019 Packard Fellow for her research on cell signaling. Every year since 1988, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation has awarded Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering to early-career scientists to pursue the types of innovative projects that often fall outside the purview of traditional sources of funding, such as…
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s Dr. M. Elizabeth ‘Betz’ Halloran has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, a high honor in the fields of health and medicine. Halloran is one of the world’s top experts in statistical methods for evaluating vaccines and vaccination strategies to stop outbreaks of deadly infectious diseases. The Academy announced its 100 new members today in conjunction with its annual…
Dr. Michael Boeckh, one of the world’s leading experts in viruses that afflict patients with compromised immune systems, will deliver the prestigious John F. Enders Lecture Oct. 5 in Washington, D.C., at IDWeek, an annual conference of doctors and researchers specializing in infectious diseases. Boeckh is head of the Infectious Disease Sciences program at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He will talk…
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded $30 million in first-year funding to establish new centers for immunology research to accelerate progress in tuberculosis (TB) vaccine development. New and improved TB vaccines are badly needed. Over the past 200 years, TB has claimed the lives of more than 1 billion people—more…
The Allen Institute debuted the 2019 Next Generation Leaders, a group of six early-career neuroscientists who will participate in a special advisory council for the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a division of the Allen Institute. Now in its sixth year, the Next Generation Leaders Program was created for and by researchers in early stages of their scientific career, who…
Washington Research Foundation (WRF) has pledged over $1.5 million in additional support for a novel immunotherapy platform being developed in Dr. Jim Olson’s lab at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Fred Hutch). The Olson lab’s Simultaneous Multiple Interaction T-Cell Engagers (SMITEs) technology offers a new approach for harnessing the patient’s immune system to more specifically target cancerous cells. Possible benefits…
Patrick Wilson, PhD, professor of medicine and rheumatology at the University of Chicago, and a group of researchers from three other institutions have received a Grand Challenge for Universal Influenza Vaccine Development grant – a $12 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Flu Lab. The group will receive up to $2 million over two years…
A mutation in a cancer-promoting gene is often considered the first step on the path toward cancer. But just last year, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center postdoctoral fellow Dr. Zhe Ying discovered that instead of accelerating along this path, skin stem cells can respond to these mutations by taking the first exit, using a strategy he dubbed oncogene-induced differentiation. In this…